


tricks of ventriloquism

by whimsicalimages



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Fix-It, Headaches & Migraines, Idiots in Love, M/M, Mind Control, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), Spoilers, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-24 20:06:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14362671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whimsicalimages/pseuds/whimsicalimages
Summary: It’s past midnight, Mako Mori is back in the Shatterdome, and Hermann suspects he’s losing his staring match with Newt’s single-serve PONS headset.





	tricks of ventriloquism

**Author's Note:**

> "Pacific Rim: Uprising" produced many great reasons to fight Steven DeKnight in a parking lot, and this is my take on several of them. Title from Margaret Atwood's [Corpse Song](http://no-wasted-words.livejournal.com/194242.html). Many thanks to [A](http://hellaarabella.tumblr.com) and [M,](http://productivity-is-irrelevant.tumblr.com/) neither of whom have actually seen this garbage fire of a movie, for cheerleading and proofreading. Also, many thanks to John Boyega and Burn Gorman, for being the only reasons to watch it. Enjoy!

Pentecost the younger wears authority far better now than he did when he first returned to the PPDC – Hermann finds himself continually impressed at the stiffness of the man’s back, the grace of his bearing. He’s still so young, to be carrying so much.

We were younger when we sent those first letters after Trespasser, Newt’s voice points out in his head. Hermann shakes it off, as he has for the past decade.

Marshal Mori is frowning in her hospital bed, glancing over the tablets that Pentecost has slowly been piling up next to her on the windowsill. She had been unconscious for the worst of it – the drones, the new breaches, the final rush to destroy Newt’s terrifying handiwork – but now that Pentecost is determined to move heaven and earth to bring the fight to the kaiju home dimension, he’s conscripted Hermann to bring her all the research they have on kaiju weaknesses, as well as his own notes from his and Newt’s long-ago drift.

So he has, and it’s landed him in this hospital room, with the Pentecost siblings and a faint headache.

Mori looks up at him, brow furrowing. “What do you think, Dr. Gottlieb?” she asks.

He’s caught off-guard, not expecting to be asked. It makes him too blunt. “I think attempting to create another breach to fight the kaiju in their home is suicide,” he says. “Even with all my research, even with all the research we did in the first war, we don’t know enough about their weaknesses. We’ve been fighting them with brute force, but a battle of this magnitude would require a carefully thought-out strategy that we simply do not have the knowledge to plan.”

Mori and Pentecost exchange glances. “We don’t,” Pentecost says. “But Geiszler does.”

Hermann can feel his fingers clench down on his cane and wills them to relax. “Dr. Geiszler still isn’t in his right mind,” he says. “We have no way of knowing if anything he says is true.”

“He is our main remaining link to the kaiju dimension,” Mori counters. “If we could verify his knowledge, or if we could return him to his human self so he could verify it, that would be an invaluable asset to any potential strategy. He has spent so much time with the kaiju in his mind, but they have spent just as much with him in theirs. Also, we cannot leave him as he is.”

As he is – tied down, strapped into a chair, and yelling at anyone willing to listen about global destruction, last Hermann checked. Granted, he hasn’t been able to make himself look into Newt’s cell very often, because all he can see is the Newt from ten years ago, overjoyed and next to him, right next to Hermann, with no apparent intention of leaving. Not the Newt that looks at him like a piece of meat and tried to strangle him a few weeks ago.

Pentecost nods. “We need him, doc,” he says. “And I’m pretty sure all of us know you’re the only one who stands a chance of getting through to him.”

Hermann bristles. “I don’t know what you’re implying–”

He cuts himself off when the door opens. “Hey, hope I’m not interrupting anything too crazy,” Raleigh Becket says, guileless as ever. He puts his bag down on the lone corner of Mori’s bed that isn’t occupied by tablets, and begins to take out boxes and boxes of food, far too much, even for four people.

“Nothing that cannot wait,” Mori says, smiling.

Becket smiles back, and then turns to Hermann and Pentecost. “I wasn’t sure what you guys liked, but I figured takeout has to be better than hospital food or whatever shit they’re serving in the ‘dome now,” he says, slightly sheepish. Then he turns back to Mori, as if he can’t help but lean towards her, like a flower to sunlight.

Hermann can’t look at them for more than a few moments before he has to look away. It’s too personal.

He catches Pentecost’s eye unintentionally, and the man grimaces at him. In a room with Mori and Becket, everyone else necessarily feels like an outsider.

“No worries. I think the planning can wait,” Pentecost says, grabbing a takeout container and leaning over to kiss Mako on the forehead. “We’ll be back tomorrow, Mako. Let’s get out of here, Gottlieb.”

“Of course, Major Pentecost,” he says, pushing himself to his feet and following Pentecost out the door without allowing himself a backwards glance.

He’s known about Mori and Becket for years, since Becket would sometimes wander the base at odd hours with odder clothing, but every time he sees them together he’s struck anew at their easy way with each other. They hardly even need words to talk. He hasn’t had that in – well. He hasn’t had that. It must be nice.

Pentecost puts his hand on Hermann’s shoulder, startling him out of the mental circles he’s wandering in. “Hey, call me Jake, yeah? I’m just a pilot, my dad was the Pentecost with all the stars and ribbons,” he says.

Hermann blinks and nods. “Very well. Jake, then,” he says, and winces a little at his own stilted words. Newt was always better at the whole – human interaction business.

Jake doesn’t seem to notice; he grins and claps Hermann on the back. “It’ll be okay, Gottlieb. We already saved the world, and playing offense is easy. You’ll get your man back.”

Hermann wishes he could believe that.

-

The thing is, Newt’s been told enough times – pretty much since birth, bleak January 1990, after the ideological Wall fell but before physical one did, and how’s that for a metaphor about unpredictable changes and shit – that curiosity killed the cat, but he’s never quite managed to make himself believe it.

Hermann, though, Hermann’s gotta be equally curious about what the hell is going on down there in the anteverse, and he’s the only one in K-Sci who could ever keep up with Newt so he has to have a scientist’s curiosity by nature, right, but Newt has no issues admitting that Hermann is probably smarter about being too curious than he is. Hermann’s overly-reliant on numbers, yeah, but if he were in this position, which he wouldn’t be in the first place, he wouldn’t drift with a kaiju brain out of loneliness, or fascination, or, okay, some sort of pull from the hooks they left in his brain the first two go-rounds, because Hermann is, and always has been, a better and stronger person than him. That’s just how it is. He brings the crazy and Hermann brings the grounding force. The tether back to reality.

But Hermann isn’t here and he isn’t Hermann, even though sometimes he catches himself humming Debussy or playing mental chess with himself. So, yeah, he drifts with the kaiju brain again.

His uncle had always told him that there’s a difference between being smart and making smart choices.

This particular choice – okay, “not smart” is probably putting it a little lightly, since it only takes the one time for him to get completely fucked.

-

“I received a drive from Dr. Geiszler three years ago, in 2032, with the latest blueprints from Shao,” Mori says, when Hermann returns to collect some of the tablets. She’ll be released from the hospital soon, allegedly, but it’ll take at least five trips to get all the clutter back to the Shatterdome.

Hermann hums in acknowledgment, debating how best to transport it all.

“The other document on the drive was unreadable and I assumed it was just a defect, a fragmentary file, but now I think perhaps that was the point,” Mori continues.

Hermann glances up at her sharply. “Encrypted?”

Mori nods. “I cannot crack it, but I thought you might be able to,” she says, and holds out a small black square for him to take.

He puts his stack of tablets back down on her bed. “I can try,” he says, hoping she doesn’t notice how badly his hands shake when he takes the drive from her.

He pulls up the directory – mostly blueprints, but at the end there’s a file titled “mythology158.txt,” containing only a seemingly-random string of letters.

Mori’s right that the contents look like nonsense, but she’s also right that that’s the point. Mythology 158. Newt had never read up on Greek or Roman mythology, had never been particularly interested in the gods of a dead religion. Had never read Hamilton’s compendium.

But Hermann had. Hermann had memorized the whole miserable book by age 16, had confessed his love of it to Vanessa, who’d given him a beautiful edition on their last anniversary together. And Hermann, not Newt, had taken an early interest in historical cryptography, from the Caesar cipher to the one-time pad.

Edith Hamilton’s _Mythology_ , page 158, from the top. _She sent for Daedalus and told him he must show her a way to get out of the Labyrinth, and she sent for Theseus and told him she would bring about his escape if he would promise to take her back to Athens and marry her._

“I believe I’ve got it,” Hermann says. Newt used a sentence he saw in a book in my head as the key to a cipher form he also saw in my head, he doesn’t say. A sentence from a passage about fucking _Ariadne,_ of any myth he could have chosen.

“And?” Mori asks.

“Give me a moment,” he says. The message cuts off before the sentence ends, but a key is a key – if Newt did use Caesar shifts as Hermann suspects, it’ll be easy enough to decrypt.

Mori waits, and Hermann carefully types out what he needs. A sick feeling grows in his stomach as he gets further along in the message.

Soon, he turns the tablet to face her.

 

`SSMVIZNXHULEEDINYEUFWWWPDSQOLQGMLWALOHPGVMQSRWWKEEWWXAZLAHTEBJZKRFBSGGALEDMPXRIJMKMWEFACRPNGEGPMMDPGAAODWEZMNRIDSGNZBVMWCLXPMRBWPRCP`

`SHESENTFORDAEDALUSANDTOLDHIMHEMUSTSHOWHERAWAYTOGETOUTOFTHELABYRINTHANDSHESENTFORTHESEUSANDTOLDHIMSHEWOULDBRINGABOUTHISESCAPEIFHEWOUL`

`ALICEMUSTDIEALICEMUSTDIEALICEMUSTDIEALICEMUSTDIEALICEMUSTDIEALICEMUSTDIEALICEMUSTDIEALICEMUSTDIEALICEMUSTDIEALICEMUSTDIEALICEMUSTDIE`

 

Mori frowns. “Who is Alice?” she asks.

“I thought she was Newt’s – someone Newt was seeing,” Hermann says. He has several hunches, and none of them are good. “He invited me for dinner several times, told me I should meet her, but I couldn’t – I never managed it.”

Mori looks at him shrewdly. “I think you need to find Alice, Doctor,” she says. “Come back when you have.”

-

_Longterm Neurological Effects of Repeat PONS Use for Human-Kaiju Drifting_

Dr. N. Geiszler

 **Abstract:** Imaging studies reveal that repeated PONS contact between a human mind and the kaiju consciousness results in extreme parasitic effects. The human brain is not equipped to handle the strain of drifting with the hivemind and shows serious changes over time, despite use of new generation PONS technology, which does not require a human partner to bear neurological load and should not do any lasting damage. Immediate effects on the primary case study include audiovisual hallucinations, decreased motor control, and symptoms similar to late-stage alcohol addiction. Neurological backlash if drift contact is completely and irrevocably cut off is expected to result in major cerebrovascular accident…

_[Status: Draft. Last edited: 19 January 2031.]_

-

“You know, I don’t remember much about Dr. Geiszler from before Dad kicked me out of the program,” Jake says when they walk into Newt’s flat. “But I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have gone for something so, uh, clean. Sterile. Impersonal.”

“Cease listing attributes, please,” Hermann mutters, but he knows Jake’s right; there’s absolutely nothing in the place to indicate human occupancy, let alone to show any of Newt’s messy habits. Also, Hermann’s head has been hurting since they got within a block of the building, so he’s already predisposed to dislike it.

“People can change,” Hermann says, not really believing it. “Perhaps he hired a cleaning service in some vague attempt at adulthood.”

“Or maybe Alice hired one, whoever she is,” Jake says, going to poke his head into the other rooms.

The smooth lines of the modern furniture and enormous windows are making Hermann dizzy, and he’s beginning to feel faintly nauseous. A migraine, maybe.

Maybe not.

He feels only a little guilty for snooping as he begins to open cabinets in the living room – nothing but DVDs and endless manga volumes. None of it looks like it’s been touched in years. What was Newt doing with all his time? He can’t have spent the whole day every day at work, he’d found hours to go to concerts and have dinners right up until the last few months of the war, and the war has been long-over.

“Hey, doc? Gottlieb?” Jake calls from what is ostensibly Newt’s bedroom, voice at an odd pitch. “I think you’re gonna want to see this.”

Hermann closes the cabinet and heads towards the bedroom as the pounding in his skull grows stronger. Jake is standing just inside the doorway, frozen.

“What is it?” Hermann asks, before he peers inside and realizes what, exactly, has Jake so apprehensive. He feels downright ill, knows he’s leaning too-heavily on his cane.

A perfectly-preserved kaiju brain in a full tank of filtered solution, and a new-generation PONS device hanging on a hook next to it.

“I know I’m probably stating the obvious, here, but just to make sure, you’re seeing this too? He’s got a fucking kaiju brain in his bedroom,” Jake says.

“Not just any kaiju brain,” Hermann says tightly, as the realization crystallizes in his mind. “That’s Alice. Excuse me a moment.”

He goes to the bathroom and throws up in the toilet as soon as he manages to get the door shut. Pressing his forehead against the cool porcelain and trying to think of nothing at all, he can’t help but notice that his headache has receded even from moments ago in the bedroom, confirming his own half-baked suspicions.

He grits his teeth and levers himself up to rinse out his mouth. One piece of the puzzle, Gottlieb, he thinks resolutely. Find the rest and put it together.

Jake is waiting for him in the kitchen when he manages to gather himself enough to exit. “Didn’t want to be in a room with that thing any longer than I had to be,” he says. “You feeling okay? You looked pretty green, over there.”

“I’ve had better days. Unfortunately, I’ll need to ask you to return to the room for long enough to go through Newt’s desk,” Hermann says. “I don’t think I’m capable of it, at the moment. I’ve been getting some sort of – extremely unpleasant neural feedback from the kaiju brain when I move closer to it, and I’d prefer not to test my limits.”

Jake’s face flashes through five shades of alarm before going still and completely calm, the way the Marshal used to get. “Got it,” he says. “Anything in particular I should be looking for?”

“Oh, drives, tablets, any tech he’s left lying around,” Hermann says, waving a hand. “There must be some. We’ll have to take the brain back to base but moving that tank will require a more professional operation than the two of us.”

Jake makes a face. “Fine,” he says. “I’ll be back in a minute. Don’t keel over.”

Hermann rolls his eyes but nods, and Jake visibly steels himself and turns back to the bedroom. Hermann evaluates: the nausea has abated, but the headache remains. It’s not so bad, though. He can work through it.

C’mon, Hermann, take care of yourself for once, Newt’s voice tells him. I haven’t been around to force-feed you sumatriptan in years.

He opens the fridge looking for something else to think about, but there’s barely even anything to see. Expired soymilk, and not the sugary American stuff Newt had liked. A single apple. The pantry isn’t any more inspiring – several cans of chickpeas and a few packages of instant noodles. A container of one of those disgusting nutrient powders.

God, what had they done to him? This looks like what _Hermann_ would maintain during a bad phase. Newt had always loved cooking, had loved the experience of eating, had snuck his way into the Shatterdome kitchens on more than one occasion to make something special for some event or other, back before the PPDC was on military rations. He’d made a good go of it after, too, but it had been hard to cook with protein blocks. Newt always said it was like being on an episode of one of his strange American competitive cooking shows, where all the real ingredients are replaced with dubious substitutes.

Jake returns with a tablet and several drives, returning Hermann’s focus to the present. “Thank you,” Hermann says.

Jake eyes him warily. “How’s your head?”

Hermann musters up a weak smile. “Adequate,” he says. “We can take these back with us and I’ll see if I need to do any more decryption.”

Jake nods, and then pauses, making a face like he wants to say something and doesn’t know how. It’s a face Hermann has seen from many, many people over the course of his life, and he always hates whatever comes after.

“What,” Hermann says.

Jake takes a crumpled piece of yellow paper out of his pocket and places it on the counter at Hermann’s elbow. “I found a bunch of these balled up in his desk drawer, along with, like, eight blank legal pads,” Jake says. “I didn’t even know people still used legal pads made of actual paper.”

Hermann knows. Newt told him once that he’d gotten into the habit of using them in college and just – never stopped, despite his various tirades about recycling and tree-killing and the general superiority of touchscreens. Hermann used to find sketches of kaiju viscera and tattoo designs and silly handwritten notes on torn-out legal paper all over their lab. He thinks he still has some of them in a box in storage somewhere.

Hermann flattens out the sheet, but it’s mostly blank. The only things written on it are a dateline at the top from several years ago, Hermann’s name, and “I’m sorry.”

Jake shifts uncomfortably. “I only looked at a few of them, but they all say pretty much the same thing,” he says.

Hermann closes his eyes. “Thank you for telling me,” he says, because it’s what he’s supposed to say, isn’t it? Years and he’d never done anything, never made any effort to find out what had actually happened to Newt, out of his own cowardice and shame and hurt.

You always gotta make it about you, huh, Hermann? I pushed you away first, Newt would say. 

But Newt’s not here. Hermann permits himself one more moment of self-pity before forcing himself to reckon with the present.

“You good?” Jake asks. Some things, it seems, resist genetics – Marshal Pentecost, for all his son’s similarities, would never have bothered to ask. But then, the world had been ending. None of them had the time to worry about emotional health.

“Good enough,” Hermann says.

“Then back to Moyulan it is,” Jake says, and they troop out.

-

There are three things nobody ever tells Newt about the drift.

1\. The blue of the drift, if you’re drifting with a person who is a human and not an alien, isn’t really the way civilians must think about it, from Lightcap’s first descriptions of a perfect cerulean-tinted lens. It’s actually every blue – no one has figured out why it’s blue and not, say, red, or green, or any other color, although if you’re drifting with a non-human, all bets are off. The point is, it’s not just one blue, it’s every single blue you can imagine, as many blues as there are varieties of human experience, or moments that flash by when you’re unintentionally in the front seat to someone else’s memory movie reel. And it’s not like a lens, it’s not like something you can imagine away, it’s just how those memories look, it’s how you’ll think about them, if you ever think about them again, months later, or even years later, you won’t know what they looked like in full color because they’ll all be preserved exactly in blue. In every blue.

2\. Pilots warn you that you can’t get stuck on remembering one thing or you’ll lose control while you’re chasing whatever’s buried at your core, whatever’s buried at the other person’s, what you’ve both worked so hard to bury, but if you have eidetic memory, it works a little differently, because you can’t help tucking everything away like some kind of weird and terrible file directory, every stupid glimpse of high school when you’re-he’s-you’re a skinny twerp getting pushed around, every flash of nova-bright joy when you win a chess game or nail a guitar solo with your shitty cover band or publish a paper somewhere prestigious, every page of the book of myths she gave you when she left you. No, when he left her. Or when he left you? It was mutual.

3\. It always leaves fragments. Hang out in someone’s head once and you’re done in forever. Of course, that’s not how anyone wants to think of it, or how you want to think of it, obviously, because you’re human and you value your independent thoughts and all that garbage, but maybe suddenly you want to wear blazers, or, you don’t know, sniff chalk dust. We’ve all got quirks, right? Maybe you like opera now, or have a passing interest in cryptography, or it’s six-seven-eight years down the line and you’ve thrown away the person you used to be and you don’t know why or when it happened or how to get it back, if you can get it back at all and it’s not too late because, well, you’ve become a different person, or even an _unperson_ , and maybe there’s no going back from that. Maybe you’re not strong enough to try, since you’re out here on your own, or sort of on your own, just you and the bits and pieces that aren’t human. Are, in fact, inhuman. Or none of you is human, anymore, really, because you left the human-ness behind somewhere you can’t return to. Whatever.

-

Mako Mori is released from the hospital on April 5, 2035, which Hermann only knows because Becket has been conscripted by Jake, Lambert, and Reyes to yell at young cadets with them, and rumors of Mori’s return caused quite a stir among the younger set. Hermann had been there to welcome her back when she’d walked into the Shatterdome on crutches but under her own power, one of her legs in a cast and a smile on her face. It had felt like a breath of relief, a small step back to normalcy.

Now, it’s past midnight, and Hermann suspects he’s losing his staring match with Newt’s single-serve PONS headset.

You think you’re gonna learn anything new if you watch it for long enough? Newt’s voice asks. It’s just a PONS device. You’ve seen a bazillion of them.

Well. It’s better than watching Newt, who mostly remains unnaturally still in the chair he’s strapped into, but sometimes breaks into half-crazed rants about the kaiju master plan. Hermann couldn’t bring himself to sit through much of the feeds.

“Jake told me that you found Dr. Geiszler’s ‘Alice,’” Mori says. Hermann turns to see her in the doorway, one hand holding a tablet and the other clenched into a fist.

Newt had made a cake for Mako’s eighteenth birthday, one year after he and Hermann had been assigned to Hong Kong. It was meant to be a surprise, but she’d figured it out for herself when she heard Newt and Hermann debating the relative merits of vanilla frosting. She’d only told them the next year that she’d known; at the time, she had feigned surprise well enough, and Newt had been ecstatic.

Hermann may have walked her through the old code for the Mark I jaegers and Tendo may have taught her how to jerry-rig them, but Newt had treated her like a younger sister. Hermann forgets, sometimes, that he isn’t the only one who feels Newt’s absence keenly.

“We did,” Hermann says at last, realizing he hasn’t responded for too long. “The brain is here, now.”

They both glance towards the back of the lab, where the brain is currently sitting in cold storage behind thick enough doors and enough padding that Hermann’s head feels fine at the moment.

“How often did he drift with it?”

“Wear on the PONS suggests frequent, if not daily, use,” Hermann says, grim. “And one of the drives we found in his desk indicates that he was recording its effects on him for some time.” He pauses, and soldiers on. “And that complete cut-off would most likely result in a severe stroke, at the very least.”

“So if we destroy the brain, he would die from neural overload,” Mori summarizes. “Yet he still wrote that we must destroy it. He would sacrifice himself to ensure it.”

“I know, yes, ‘Alice must die,’” Hermann mumbles.

Mori looks at him and tilts her head, considering. “But Newton Geiszler must not,” she says. “You want to share the load.”

Hermann draws himself up and nods. “I want to share the load,” he confirms.

“Why?” she asks.

This must be some sort of test; she must already know. Hermann has never been particularly subtle, never tried to hide it. Anyone less obtuse than Newton Geiszler himself surely must have noticed, and Mori is anything except obtuse. Nonetheless, he answers. “We’ve drifted before and are drift-compatible, so I stand the best chance of surviving the experience, and if we bear the backlash equally we may even _both_ come out of it alive,” he says, and then pauses to collect himself. “And I cannot let him fight this alone. He has been fighting it for ten years without me, and I didn’t know, and I can’t allow that to continue. Not when we could beat it together.”

“Or die together,” Mori says. “And simultaneously cost us our best breach expert and our only source of current information on the kaiju dimension. Or give the kaiju control over you as well, as we do not know the extent to which they still have influence over Dr. Geiszler, or how that control would act upon a second mind.”

“I know the risks, Marshal,” Hermann says.

“Very well,” Mori says.

Hermann blinks. He hadn’t been expecting her to approve yet.

Mori snorts at his expression. “If we want him to tell us anything about the anteverse, he must be alive and cognizant enough to do so. And in any case, as you said, he has been fighting for ten years alone. He does not deserve to die for that fight.” She looks away, and then meets his eyes. “Newt was a good man, and if we can bring him back, we must try.”

“You aren’t telling me to come up with a safer plan?” Hermann says, suspicious. “You think this could actually succeed?”

Mori smiles, bright in the half-light of the lab. “It is a dangerous plan, but some things are more powerful than the kaiju hivemind or neural backlash, Doctor. I believe you will prove me right.”

-

In his defense, when he realizes how far deep he’s gone, Newt does his level best to avoid the outcome the precursors are pushing for.

In February 2030, he turns off the gel circulation keeping Alice in stasis in the tank, and resolutely locks himself out of his bedroom and goes to sleep on the couch. I only had to flip the switch, he thinks, giddy with it. He can kill his self-inflicted nightmare, just like that. It’ll be two hours before the lack of filtration does permanent damage, but this way, it’s inconspicuous enough that there’s no pain in the back of his head, no poisonous voices in his ears.

His mistake, in hindsight, is thinking about it at all. He wakes up in the morning with an extremely sore shoulder and a broken bedroom door, the tank bubbling away and the switch back in the ‘on’ setting.

The next month, he tries it again – his head hurts constantly already because he hasn’t been drifting with Alice often enough, so he figures he can fend off the pain for two hours. It can’t be that bad, right? What’s a constant migraine for one guy compared to global destruction? Hell, what’s one death compared to millions?

That’s the first time they take control while he’s awake. Truth be told, he’d thought the three weeks since the last time he’d drifted would be enough to keep the link weak and prevent that possibility. Instead, he learns the hard way that being kicked out of his own brain is about as unpleasant as he might’ve expected and twice as painful, and the tank stays on. Alice stays alive.

It’s then that he writes down what’s happening to him, the abstract to a paper he’s never going to finish, and saves it on as many backup drives as he has lying around. Maybe someone will get a real kick out of it one day, he thinks glumly.

Those months, there’s a pleasant haze for a day or two after drifting, like a drawn-out version of being mildly tipsy. After that, the headache grows and grows until he drifts again, and he hates that he’s being fucking _conditioned_ by aliens to agree to their mind control as if they’re Pavlov and he’s the idiot dog. He gets so pissed off that he actually tries to take a baseball bat to the tank at some point in late 2031 – the whole year is kind of a blur, if he’s being honest – but as soon as he gets within five feet, the wave of pain is enough to make him stumble and fall to his knees. He drops the bat, and then he’s not Newt anymore, not the one in charge of his limbs, and the body which he usually-but-not-always controls is taking the bat, marching downstairs and out of the building, and throwing it into the fucking ocean. When he wrests back control for long enough to jump after it, all he gets for his troubles is a mouthful of moderately-polluted seawater and a soaked walk back to his apartment, rather than the drowning he’d spitefully wished for.

So: he can’t kill Alice, and he can’t kill himself.

Time to get creative, he thinks, and starts really trying to reach Hermann. All right, it isn’t that creative, but this, apparently, is what truly terrifies the hivemind, which makes sense because Newt hasn’t responded to Hermann in years. Hasn’t wanted to, had chalked it up to lingering rejection from the drift and his own busy work schedule, but he doesn’t think that’s why, anymore. Him, not wanting to talk to Hermann? That should have been the first sign something was horribly wrong, in retrospect. The first messages he tries are innocuous invitations to dinner and check-ins about conferences they’re both attending, but he can’t even get those out. He has a hundred draft emails with subject lines like “help” but can never force himself to hit send. Hermann hasn’t initiated contact in months, and Newt can’t blame him – he can’t make his fingers type a response.

Then again, that tells him he’s on the right track. Find what they’re afraid of and use it against them, and for some reason, Hermann Gottlieb – yes, that one, the stodgy mathematician who Newt was pathetically in love with and never told because he didn’t want to ruin anything, because the only thing he saw in Hermann’s mind was an easy fondness, because Hermann had always been too good for him anyway – that same Hermann Gottlieb is what the kaiju are afraid of.

Ultimately, he manages to send exactly one message to Hermann, by way of Mako and an encrypted text file in 2032, trying to not think about it so it’ll fly under the radar. Once it’s amazingly, miraculously gone, he writes out pages and pages of apologies to Hermann in blue-blue-blue ink, for what he did and what he doesn’t think he’ll be able to stop himself from doing, and when he remembers the message he _did_ send, he gets booted from the mental steering wheel, completely and permanently. The apologies remain in his desk drawer.

The three years after that, he can only watch.

-

“For the record, I still think this is a terrible idea,” Jake says. Hermann can see through the window between their two rooms that he’s standing far closer to the tank than Hermann could bear, shifting uneasily on his feet as the gel level gets closer and closer to the bottom.

“Your objections have been noted,” Hermann says, turning back to Newt, who is absently rubbing his wrists against the straps of the chair. They’re already red with chafing, and Hermann itches to still his hands.

“And ignored,” Jake says. “I know.”

“Jake,” Mori’s voice says through the intercom. “Dr. Geiszler’s notes say that it will be two hours before any real damage is done to the brain once the tank is completely drained, so you will have to kill it as soon as possible once Dr. Gottlieb is in the drift. I’m not risking his mind any longer than necessary.”

“Yeah, yeah, you give the greenlight, I pop the tank open and shoot this thing enough times that there’s no way to bring it back,” Jake recaps. “Hey, Geiszler’s been pretty quiet in there, he awake? Not ranting and raving?”

Newt has, in fact, been conspicuously silent. They’d decided to keep him conscious so that he’d hopefully be capable of fighting the pain, but he hasn’t said anything or even turned to watch as they’ve drained Alice’s tank. He hasn’t resisted as they put the PONS device on his head and connected it to Hermann’s, hasn’t yelled or tried to knock over his own chair or snarled at anyone.

Hermann looks at him and sighs, and Newt finally looks back. Or – not-Newt, because Newt would never grin like that. Hermann swallows down his instinctive revulsion at the monster wearing Newt’s face.

“This will kill him, you know,” the-thing-inside-Newt-which-isn’t-Newt says in its horrid voice. “It will be your fault that he dies. Or, that whatever’s left of him dies. There’s not much.” It laughs, or something like a laugh. “You’ll be dead, too, though, so it won’t really matter.”

“Marshal, how long do I have?” Hermann asks, tamping down the queasiness. He has the switch in his hand. He just needs to press it, and ignore this – impostor.

“Sixty seconds,” Mori says. “You will have a further sixty seconds in the drift before Jake opens the tank.”

“So sweet. Sixty seconds to say goodbye!” not-Newt sing-songs. “Better remember all your good times now, before we kill you for interfering with our plans.”

“When I asked why you were being quiet, it wasn’t an invitation,” Jake says.

“Dr. Gottlieb,” Mori says. “You may proceed with neural handshake. Good luck.”

He steels himself, and turns on the PONS.

-

The drift is neither cold not hot, a gentle absence of temperature – Hermann had forgotten the feel of it, of sinking into a weightless space, surrounded by blue on blue on blue.

Almost. There are flashes of an ugly orange, here.

“Newt?” he calls. It’s strange – last time, he’d found himself immediately in Newt’s memories, but now he’s in a shimmering, almost-featureless hallway. It’s like a completely different mind, which is a terrifying thought. What if there really is no more Newton Geiszler?

No, he tells himself firmly. He refuses to believe that Newt would plant those clues and then give up so easily. Newt was at least as stubborn as him on an average day, and on a good day he was more so, though Hermann is loath to admit it. Three years or five or even ten wouldn’t be enough to wipe him out entirely.

“Newt, I know you must be here,” he says, beginning to walk. The hallway must lead _somewhere_.

And then Newt is there in front of him, brow furrowed. This is fully Newt, no kaiju influence visible on his face, just concern and those awful chunky glasses. He looks underslept and underfed, and Hermann is unspeakably, hideously glad to see him. “Hermann? You’re not a hallucination, are you?” he asks, peering closer.

“Certainly not,” Hermann says, voice thick. It’s been – so long since he’s seen that expression. “I received your message, and so here I am.”

Newt frowns, then rears back. “You fucking idiot, you really are here! What, are you using a PONS? They let you use a PONS to drift with me? You were supposed to kill Alice, not come here yourself! What the hell is the PPDC gonna do when the feedback fries both of us?”

“Your key was the story of Ariadne,” Hermann points out, quite reasonably, he feels. “And you didn’t seem to be succeeding as Theseus alone.”

“I think in this version, I’m the minotaur,” Newt says, grimacing. “Congrats, Hermann, you found the monster in the middle of the maze! Now we’re both going to pay for it.”

“Newton,” Hermann says, knowing that he’s showing too much, “you were never the minotaur.”

Newt takes his shoulders as if he’s about to shake him, but deflates at the last minute and just leans his forehead on Hermann’s chest. “God, what the fuck were you thinking, Hermann?” he whispers. “Get out of my head before you die in it. That’s gotta be your worst nightmare, dude.”

All of his worst nightmares involve Newt dying, not himself. “You are not the minotaur, Newt,” Hermann repeats instead. “And neither of us will die here.”

“God, you’re so,” Newt stops and throws his hands up. “You’re fucking infuriating, you know that?”

“I’ve been told, yes.”

Something moves in the corner of his vision, shadows slithering across the darkness, but he determinedly ignores it. Outside, he thinks, it has to have been longer than a minute and Jake must be about to kill Alice-the-kaiju-brain. Outside this little universe of Hermann and Newt and the monsters squatting in Newt’s head. They breathe together.

“Hermann,” Newt says eventually. “If I have to watch you get killed inside my brain and that’s my last memory of being a stupid human, I’m going to kick god’s ass when I get to the afterlife.”

“You don’t believe in god.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” Newt says. “Hermann, come on, you need to get out of here and stay alive.”

“I am not leaving without you,” Hermann says, firm. “I will not leave you behind, do you understand?”

Newt blinks at him, and his eyes go wide. “I, uh, I think I do, but also, this is the single worst fucking time to be having this conversation, we should have had it years ago but we’re both stupid, apparently, but you need to be safe, okay? You can’t die, Hermann, you have to leave,” Newt says, and pauses at whatever he sees on Hermann’s face. Then he barrels onwards. “You saved the world again! You can do it without me, and you have to know, I tried to tell you–”

_Another human. So weak, so small. Remember, Newton, you are ours._

Newt turns, eyes darting from side to side, and Hermann can see the walls around them heaving, dark blue streaked with the horrible brightness of kaiju blood. He takes Newt’s hand – braver than he would be in real life. But perhaps this is a moment that calls for more bravery than he’s ever needed in real life.

Newt looks back at him. Hermann, he mouths, but now there is no sound. Hermann, I–

 _He is ours,_ a million voices whisper around them.

_He is ours, and you can’t have him, human-creature._

_We have been here before you and we will be here after you and you cannot have him back because he was never yours because he is ours._

Then – searing pain. His knees almost buckle, but he and Newt are still hanging on to one another.

Jake must have killed the brain. Alice, he thinks, but he isn’t sure if that’s his thought or Newt’s. Alice is dead.

The whispers around them have become a screeching wind, and Hermann isn’t sure he could let go of Newt’s hand if he tried, and Newt has his eyes squeezed shut like that might block out the howling.

_He is ours, he is ours, he is ours! We have taken him and made him one of us and he is ours! Kill one of us but it doesn’t matter, because he will always be ours or he will be nothing! We have taken everything that he is and you cannot have him! We control him and he is ours!_

At that, something mammalian rises up in him, warm-blooded and possessive, something Hermann hadn’t even known was living in his bones. Something terrible and strong and human, so very human. It feels enormous – he feels bigger than the alien presence, he feels as if he could burn the kaiju out of Newt’s mind himself, because surely, surely nothing can drown this out. Surely the universe isn’t capable of making something that could destroy this.

Hermann sets his jaw, and meets the six-twenty-hundred eyes watching him, and squeezes Newt’s hand in his. The animal in his chest bares its teeth.

He says:

“He is _not yours_.”

The kaiju begin to scream.

-

Hermann wakes up to Newt yelling something, and has a brief moment where he thinks it’s 2024 and he’s fallen asleep in the lab again, which he always regrets primarily because each time it happens Newt uses it as leverage for the next time _he_ falls asleep in the lab and Hermann trips over him.

Then Newt’s words register, along with what feels like full-body muscle pain. He hasn’t felt this achy in years. In ten years, to be exact.

“Come on, dude, I know you have no reason to trust me, but you have to let me out of this chair, I need to check that he’s okay, if he’s possessed now I’m gonna be so fucking pissed. I told him, I tried to warn him to get out of there, I realized a long time ago I couldn’t hold them off myself but I thought maybe killing Alice would be enough except I didn’t think he’d go in there and try to save me like some sort of big damn hero–”

“Newton,” Hermann interrupts him, opening his eyes. The room is very bright. “Be quiet.”

“I’m quiet,” Newt says, not at all quietly. “I’m so fucking quiet, Hermann, what the _fuck_ were you thinking? You could have died!”

“He did get you unpossessed,” Jake says. He must have come into their room while Hermann was unconscious.

“But what if he hadn’t?” Newt asks, turning to him, wild-eyed. “You just let him risk his life? To save me? What the fuck? I make bad enough choices that I got literally mind-controlled by aliens for, god, holy shit, almost ten fucking years.”

“Nobody ‘let’ me do anything,” Hermann says, pulling the PONS headset off his head with a wince. He sincerely hopes that’ll be the last time he ever uses one.

“We probably couldn’t have stopped him if we wanted to,” Jake agrees. “On the bright side, not sure what Mako’ll say, but I think this whole rant is pretty clear evidence in favor of the ‘you’re not possessed anymore’ argument. Kaiju-you was a dick.”

The door opens, and Mori walks in, along with Becket, presumably there in case things go horribly awry and they need to subdue both Hermann and Newt simultaneously.

“Oh, hi guys, it’s a party,” Newt says faintly. “You here to test me? That would be fine, I’m down, I’ll take whatever tests you want, but if you’re not letting me up, could you at least get someone down here to check that Hermann isn’t, like, about to stroke out? He just spent a while in my head which isn’t pretty even when it’s not the rope in a tug-of-war between Hermann ‘Fight Me, Jackass’ Gottlieb and the crazy extraterrestrials who tried to use my body to destroy the planet, and I’m just saying, someone should make sure he’s okay–”

“We will let you out of the chair, Newt,” Mako says, interrupting him. Jake starts to untie the straps.

“Thanks, Mako, also, I’m sorry about your leg, and about everything else, it’s been kind of a bad fucking decade for me, even though I wasn’t really in control, technically, it was still my body and my initial mistake because I’m an idiot, but setting all that aside, can someone please call a real doctor to check over Hermann? I’m begging, here.”

“Newton,” Hermann says, less sternly than he means to because he can’t fight the ridiculous, buoyant hope singing in his veins. “I feel fine. Stop fretting.”

Newt’s face goes through about eight different variations on ‘apoplectic’ as Jake undoes the last strap.

“You ‘feel fine?’” Newt says, voice taking on a dangerous edge as he gets up and stalks towards the chair Hermann remains slumped in. Hermann can only look up at him and try to control the smile that threatens to emerge. “Well, false alarm, everything must be totally okay if you just _feel fine_! Stand down, people, Hermann feels fine! Sometimes, you and your stupid, brilliant brain make me so fucking mad, you know that? I can’t believe you did that. God, you don't even understand how much I missed you, Hermann, and if I didn’t love you to the point of irrationality I’d have killed you thirty times over while we were still sharing a lab, you horrible, amazing person!”

Becket smothers a laugh and the corners of Mori’s mouth twitch upwards. Jake looks like he’d rather be anywhere but here.

Mori is first to recover, naturally. “We will debrief later,” she says, and herds Jake and Becket out of the room. She turns back and gives them a blinding grin before she closes the door. “Congratulations, Dr. Gottlieb, and welcome back, Dr. Geiszler. I’ll send someone down to do a brain scan and make sure your tests are normal.”

Newt, still slightly out of breath from his yelling, shuts his mouth and nods.

“Are you happy now? Someone will come and stick us with needles soon enough,” Hermann says.

“Hermann,” Newt says, palms hovering over Hermann’s shoulders, then coming up to his face, then back down to take his hands, like he doesn’t know where to put them, or isn’t sure of his welcome. Hermann twines their fingers together to make things clear. “Hermann, Hermann, Hermann. You are such a goddamn hypocrite, you always yelled at me for being fucking reckless and you went and pulled that bullshit. Just had to be a hero, huh?”

“I couldn’t very well let you get yourself killed by a kaiju,” Hermann says. “Not when we’d saved the world to prevent that sort of thing.”

“So you’d get killed along with me? Or we’d both get turned into vegetables, or get fucking possessed? No, Hermann, what the fuck, you have to know that watching you die is maybe the worst thing I could imagine, and I can imagine a lot of fucked-up shit. A lot of it, I don’t have to imagine, because I’ve seen it from the passenger seat of my own head,” Newt says, shaking his head. “Never do anything like that to me again. Jesus.”

“I wasn’t planning on needing to,” Hermann says. In a fit of impulse he’ll later ascribe to lingering effects of the drift, he brings Newt’s hand to his lips and presses a kiss to his knuckles. “I won’t have to, if you stay here. With me.”

“Hermann,” Newt says weakly. “Bold ask, after seeing what’s been living in my head.”

Hermann just raises his eyebrows.

“Seriously, what the fuck is this impulsive streak? You don’t even know if I’m completely me. Even if I am, this is gonna fuck me up for a while. Maybe forever. It doesn’t feel great, getting sidelined in your brain.”

“Well, I suppose we’ll just have to work through it together. Besides, I think I can tell the difference between the Newton Geiszler possessed by aliens and the Newton Geiszler I’ve loved for twelve years,” Hermann says, smiling now.

Newt opens his mouth and closes it several times. The great Newton Geiszler, speechless. It’s very satisfying.

“If you make me cry, I’m gonna sue, you enormous asshole,” Newt says at last.

Hermann can’t help but laugh, elation coursing through him like victory because he’s done it, he did it, Newt is next to him and Newt is himself, and Newt doesn’t belong to any monsters because he belongs here, with Hermann on this human earth, and Hermann’s still laughing as Newt finally ducks down and presses their mouths together.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me and yell with me [here](http://keensers.tumblr.com/) on tumblr. Thanks for reading!


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